Pentium 4 3.06GHz Processor With Hyperthreading - Page 5

Our analysis wouldn't be complete if we didn't fire up at a few different gaming benchmarks for your edification. We chose some of the old and some of the new for this round, Quake 3, Novalogic's Comanche 4 and Unreal Tournament 2003.

3D Gaming performance with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament 2003

Play time

Resolution and Color Depth: 640X480X16 "Normal"

Resolution and Color Depth: 640X480X32

In these two tests, we let the processors run flat out, with our detail and screen resolutions dialed down to very low levels. Again, this takes the limitation off the Graphics subsystem and places more emphasis on the host CPU to push as many polygons through as possible. The new 3GHz P4 runs up to 6% faster in these tests, than it's 2.8GHz sibling but Hyperthreading has little effect on performance. Quake 3, we know was initially coded to take advantage of SMP. However, this aging game engine doesn't tax the latest processor nearly enough to show benefit.